"The opposite of a slave is not a free man. It's a worshiper." [Mark Buchanan, "The Rest Of God"]
“Here is a profoundly significant fact: In our culture, among Christians and non-Christians alike, Jesus Christ is automatically disassociated from brilliance or intellectual capacity. Not one in a thousand will spontaneously think of him in conjunction with words such as well-informed, brilliant, or smart… [But] all these things [from Scripture] show Jesus’ cognitive and practical mastery of every phase of reality: physical, moral, and spiritual. He is Master only because he is Maestro. “Jesus is Lord” can mean little in practice for anyone who has to hesitate before saying, “Jesus is smart.” He is not just nice, he is brilliant. He is the smartest man who ever lived. He is now supervising the entire course of world history (Rev. 1:5) while simultaneously preparing the rest of the universe for our future role in it (John 14:2). He always has the best information on everything and certainly also on the things that matter most in human life. Let us now hear his teachings [the Beatitudes] on who has the good life, on who is among the truly blessed.” [Dallas Willard, “The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God”]
“We are so often caught up in our activities that we tend to worship our work, work at our play, and play at our worship.”[Charles Swindoll]
“There are only two factors which prevent this situation [i.e. waking up next to my wife] from being so overpoweringly awesome that my heart would explode just trying to take it all in: one is that I have woken up just like this, with this same woman beside me, hundreds of times before; and the other is that millions of other men and women are waking up beside each other, just like this, each and every day all around the world, and have been for thousands of years. Just so easily are miracles unraveled, disqualified, turned back into the common stuff of everyday life. Just so easily do statistics sprinkle their unmagical dust over all the wondrous beauty of life, transforming the celestial into the commonplace, the impossible into the inescapable. Yet if even the miracle of a man and a woman in love can be stripped of its splendor, covered with dust, buried under ordinariness, then what hope have we men and women of ever surviving the monotony of Heaven, where love will be as common as air? How shall we cope in an afterlife where there will be nothing miraculous to lift us out of our tedium, because there will be nothing unmiraculous? Here and now, it seems, is the time to practice amazement, the time to learn how to be thunderstruck. Either we suffocate under all that is unbeautiful, unsurprising, unspectacular, ungraceful in our lives, or else we learn here and now to breathe the air of grace. In marriage, to put this thought into more homely language, we learn how to appreciate one another, to see one another as precious. We learn to love.” [Mike Mason, “The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations On The Miracle”]
